More than 110 Chinese language teachers came to CMU to exchange ideas at the fifth biannual CLTA-WPA Foreign Language Teaching Symposium. The daylong event included workshops and panel discussions on topics like Chinese culture instruction and technology-enhanced learning.

CMU’s Dietrich College has selected seven Andrew W. Mellon Fellows. The Ph.D. students are preparing to start ambitious projects that blend research from the English, History, Modern Languages and Philosophy Departments with cutting-edge technology to create new applications for humanities work.

CMU’s Carolyn Rosé believes MOOCs have fallen short in one area that she is working to fix: incorporating the social aspects that are essential to learning into the curriculum. Rosé has been researching and developing software to improve online support and to help students virtually collaborate in ways that enhance what they learn.

An education platform built by CMU’s Justine Cassell speaks “vernacular” to African-American children and achieves better results in teaching scientific concepts than when the computer spoke in standard English.

The inaugural Teaching & Learning Summit will be an opportunity for faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and staff to discuss and exchange teaching strategies and explore how educational research at the university can be applied in classrooms. Daniel Willingham, a renowned cognitive psychologist, author, and debunker of educational myths, will give the keynote address on “Critical Thinking: Why is it so hard to teach?”

More than ever, digital tutors are teaching eager learners. CMU’s Vincent Aleven sees big opportunities for digital tutors, backed by his 20 years of research in artificial intelligence in education. His current research is making them more adaptive to the similarities and differences of learners.

For schools to successfully use technology, it has to be connected tightly to the curriculum, said Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Koedinger researches the creation of educational technologies that increase student achievement.

Carnegie Mellon has long been at the fore of the adaptive-learning field. Two decades ago, researchers at the Pittsburgh-based university pioneered the software that eventually became known as Cognitive Tutor.

With more than 205 trillion ways to teach and learn, it is easy to understand why going back to school can be overwhelming for students at any level—and their instructors. Here are three research-backed tips to help start the school year off on the right foot.

CMU's Simon Initiative collaborated with the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education (PCHE) to hold the first-of-its-kind PCHE Simon Summer School to support educators in incorporating Simon technologies and approach into their instruction at their home institutions.

The district has partnered with local groups like Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab, ABC Create and Bird Brain Robotics to support Pittsburgh resources and hopefully boost engagement for students.

OLI, which began in the early 2000s, is an online learning platform that features not only readings and videos, but also modules, problem-solving exercises, and virtual labs. Norman Bier, Director of OLI and Core Collaborations at CMU, said the initiative aims to create an enriching learning experience for CMU students.

Matching schools with effective edtech involves a bit of trial and error. But when elementary, middle and high schools are spending $6.6 billion on technology tools, according to Carnegie Mellon University estimates, experts say it's important to know if that money is delivering results.

In his role as head coach for the U.S. International Math Olympiad team, Loh has helped turned the Americans into a veritable powerhouse. After winning the Olympiad in 2015, a first for the U.S. in 21 years, in July Loh’s team duplicated the feat, this time having all six team members take home gold medals.

The field of cognitive psychology and big data’s intersection with education, language and brain sciences would not exist as they are today without Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Psychology.

Solving a hairy math problem might send a shudder of exultation along your spinal cord. But scientists have historically struggled to deconstruct the exact mental alchemy that occurs when the brain successfully leaps the gap from “Say what?” to “Aha!” Now, using an innovative combination of brain-imaging analyses, researchers have captured four fleeting stages of creative thinking in math.

The Simon Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University has concluded its 12th annual LearnLab Summer School, a week-long intensive course that teaches graduate students, working professionals and researchers about CMU-developed tools that merge education, data and technology.

When it comes to learning math, how much fun you are having is rarely factored into the equation. That isn't to say that game designers have not tried to turn instruction into more engaging material. For instance, there are plenty of educational games on the shelves; unfortunately, very few of them have been shown, through empirical research, to lead to improved learning outcomes, particularly in mathematics. But, that is about to change.

Ashish Aggarwal wants to help students taking online classes by creating a digital teaching assistant to answer questions. To help turn his idea into reality, Aggarwal needed to learn about data and software. So, he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University’s Simon Initiative LearnLab Summer School, which teaches participants about the leading tools that merge education, data and technology — all of which are developed by CMU researchers.

"What if we could read students' brains and see what they're thinking?" That was the question posed to a group of education reporters last week by John Anderson, a professor of psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, where a cross-disciplinary team of researchers is seeking to push the boundaries of adaptive educational software.

A new neuroimaging study reveals the mental stages people go through as they are solving challenging math problems. Insights from this new work may eventually be applied to the design of more effective classroom instruction – particularly in the form of improving cognitive tutors by creating models that match the brain activation and thinking patterns used to solve these problems.

Herbert Simon would have turned 100 years old on June 15, 2016. Winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics, the A.M. Turing Award, the National Medal of Science and many other awards, Herb Simon joined the CMU faculty in 1949. And for the next 50 years, his work, and his vision, helped to turn Carnegie Mellon into a major international research university. The Simon Initiative is named in his honor.

CMU faculty and graduate students are invited to submit proposals to showcase their work in effective and/or innovative teaching strategies, TEL strategies, data from classroom research on student learning and data from learning science research. The deadline is June 30, 2016.

The new technology-enhanced learning (TEL) projects are designed to improve education for CMU students while advancing our understanding of how humans learn.

“These grants represent a unique investment in education at CMU that pays dual dividends down the road — first in improving outcomes for our learners and then in providing a foundation for future funding,” said Norman Bier, executive director of the Simon Initiative.

Amy Ogan, an educational technologist at Carnegie Mellon University, calls herself a “CMU lifer” and for good reason. She nabbed both her undergraduate degree and Ph.D from the school. For the last couple of years, she has also worked at the university as an assistant professor, where she’s primarily focused on making classrooms, both online and offline, far more engaging.

In a lab in Pittsburgh filled with sleek computers, doll houses and an assortment of colorful toys, two scientists are trying to find better ways to teach students who speak in non-mainstream dialects how to excel in school—and in life—by learning to communicate in mainstream English.

In the Greater Pittsburgh Region, a strategic partnership has been created to introduce new and emerging educational technologies into the classroom, supplementing teaching methodology with guided practice for students and detailed progress reports for teachers.

Can robots teach better than real teachers? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University may have programmed ones that can. In an ongoing six-year program, researchers have built and tested animated children that talk with and teach elementary and middle school students.

The recommendations will help universities maximize the potential of technology-enhanced learning design and practices through informed research. “This report is a first step, not the end point, in the GLC's objective of utilizing technology to improve education outcomes,” said CMU President Subra Suresh.

A CMU alumna is leading efforts to teach computer science to all New York City public school students, and her experience with the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER) helped prepare her. PIER implements a scientifically based and rigorous Ph.D. curriculum across several departments, including Psychology, Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCII), Philosophy and Statistics, and is an affiliated project of the Simon Initiative.

The medical industry has a patient care problem, and Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and former president of the National Academy of Medicine, understands its struggles. Fineberg recently delivered a Simon Distinguished Lecture on "Technology, Information and Learning: Medical Education for the Sake of Patients.”

As universities investigate how students learn, they're working through some challenges with the current system that conducts research in disciplinary silos including psychology, neuroscience and economics. CMU’s David Klahr talks about how Carnegie Mellon is paving the way.

Nesra Yannier is a fifth-year PhD candidate in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University whose background includes computer science, design, art, and education. She drew on these skills in creating NoRILLA, a classroom technology that teaches kids the basic physics of balance.

The NSF recently held a conference to celebrate the achievements of its six Science of Learning Centers. Key members from each center, including CMU and Pitt’s LearnLab, presented their educational research accomplishments to underscore the importance of establishing a sustainable science of learning community to produce breakthroughs that impact education.

A team of CMU researchers is taking aim at the $10 million grand prize of the $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE competition, the goal of which is to empower children to take control of their own learning via tablet computers, software and the like.

If the field of cognitive science is to truly understand how the mind works, researchers need to integrate the many theories about memory, language, problem-solving and other mental functions. Carnegie Mellon University’s John R. Anderson has spent decades doing this — developing a unified theory of cognition and using it to create successful cognitive-based tutors that have revolutionized education.

With a well-established legacy of pioneering technology-enhanced learning (TEL) and through the Simon Initiative, a university-wide effort that aims to measurably improve student-learning outcomes by harnessing a learning engineering ecosystem that has developed over several decades at CMU, Carnegie Mellon is uniquely positioned to advance digital scholarship and TEL in the humanities.

CMU’s Alice software is a freely available, innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web.